Thanks Richard!
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If you’ve been following my tweets you’re probably a little confused about now. I was originally going to write this up before I got started but it just didn’t work out that way - so better late than never right…
Several months ago, I put in an order for a brew sculpture. This honking monstrosity of a brew system was something I’ve been dreaming about since I first got into homebrewing five years ago. As a kind of combo birthday, first baby, IPO gift it seemed to fit the bill :)
There is only one problem. Basically our brewing schedule as elongated from once every three months to once every 8 months (it was a crazy year last year and annie giving up beer didn’t exactly motivate me to keep brewing). It seemed like every time we fired up the kettle I was getting rustier and rustier instead of better and better at brewing.
That’s when Annie came up with a great idea - a brewing staycation. Staycation is one of the new words (for an old concept) that has come out of the recession and high gas prices. It is where you take a vacation but don’t go anywhere. Sometimes that’s just what the doctor ordered! By the title you can tell this was a staycation with a purpose - namely brewing.
The plan was a simple one - brew every day for five days. Get really comfortable with the new rig and produce enough beer that we can throw a party next year that will require a lot of drinkers to show up.
Things got off to a little bit of a bumpy start. In the past when I did larger scale production (namely 20 gallons for my wedding) I was making a single kind of beer. In this case, I’m doing 5 different ones. That meant a lot of different yeast starters. That mostly worked out except I got nervous about the health of the last two yeast colonies so I fed them again on Wed. I had also ordered in enough primary vessels for the fermentation - but forgot to get enough caps and air locks - something I eventually sorted out.
I brewed at all hours - on Tuesday I ended up having to go into work after all for a lunch meeting so I got up at 6am to start the brewing cycle and managed to have the beer in the fermenter in time to walk out the door at 12pm. My mistake was rushing out without finishing the cleaning process. I did that a second time when I started at 2pm and ended up finishing well after dark. I left everything overnight - what a mistake. It took me an hour and a half in the morning to get things ready for that day’s brewing session.
The plan was 5 beers - namely - Irish Red Ale, Dry Irish Stout, Cream Ale, Wit Beer, and our Happily Ever After Ale (A hefe with a special honey ingredient). I’ve made it through four of them and am halfway through the Happliy Ever After Ale as I write this.
This has been an arduous and awesome task. The moving and cleaning the pots seems to take a lot more strength than I have. I once read that when DogFish head started out - Sam (the founder) brewed everyday on a 10 gallon system not too different than the one I’m using. I feel for how much labor went in to keeping everything ship shape for the next round of brewing. I also get how brewing that often would allow you to really tweak the beer and get a sense for the recipe.
The awesome part has been being able to really spend time thinking about the details of the brewing process. Timing the sparge - balancing the pH - controlling the mash schedule. I feel a lot more confident as a brewer after this (though truth be told I won’t really feel good until I finish kegging all this beer and see smiles on people’s faces as they enjoy it).
I was a little worried that now was the time I would have to leave the brewing hobby behind - being a dad and such. But after this week - I guess I’m going to have to spend time talking myself out of packing it in as a developer and starting a brew pub. I have to admit even the hard parts where fun!
Time for a lunch sampler of beer
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Time for some hamachi belly at Tokyo a go go
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These are the beer buckets at the adobe birds of a feather. Of course the only beer left is bud light and mgd
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Good curry at the chaat cafe in San fran
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Max tried to get a bite of daddy’s double double- someday max when you are older
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I promised my team some time ago that I would build a light to show when the build is broken. Needless to say it got put into my Someday/Maybe pile and quickly forgotten.
I got a reminder this week that they need it after all - so I spent some time this weekend working on it.
I’ll post a better explanation later (including the code for controlling it to download a page and trigger X10)
All in all - a very satisfying project for the weekend.
